Clouds so swift, Putin comin' on

But I ain't goin' nowhere ...

"Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. [long pause] That's a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I'm not going to make." — General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., Chair Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, 2016.

Really people, you need to get a fucking grip!

Yes, rumour has it that LiveJournal's servers have (finally) been moved to Russia. (Click here for a relatively dispassionate over-view.) I suspect it's even true. But I am downright embarrassed by the number of you otherwise intelligent people who seem to have bought, hook line and proverbial sinker, the American establishment's Putin is the next Hitler meme.

I mean, dear god, this is all just (a very small) part of the demonization of a traditional enemy by a faction in the United States that has just lost power to another faction. Why exactly the former (until recently fronted by Hillary Clinton) had as the centrepiece of its foreign policy an intention to risk war with the world's second most powerful nuclear state baffles, but that's what her no-fly policy in Libya amounted to.

This isn't, I hasten to add, either an endorsement of the fascistic US President-elect, or of Russia's autocratic (at best) strongman, but rather a reminder that both official sides of the American establishemt are lying to you, and have been lying to you about anything that matters, pretty much full-time for a long time.

Are Russian intelligence services going to spy on your LiveJournal posts? No doubt, especially if you post in Russian. And, no doubt, they've been doing it for a while. If you believe the Russians "hacked the US election" (as I know at least some of you do), then you can't possibly logically think they paid attention to US laws and left LJ posts sacrosanct because the servers were outside Russia's borders?

I mean, can you?

Well, maybe you can. #Election2016 turned an awful lot of liberals into melon-heads (no offence intended towards actual melons), at least when it comes to US and international politics, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace.

Anyway, to make a long story short: although I'm happy to have DreamWidth as a back-up — and have used it as my primary posting platform for some years now; and in fact just paid for another year's membership — I'm not leaving LJ any time soon.

As my daddy told back in the infancy of teh interwebs, "Never put in an email [or anywhere else online] anything you wouldn't be willing to see on the front page of The New York Times.

Move to DreamWidth if you want (and I'll happily grant you access there/here, if you still want me around after this rant), but if you think your privacy is significantly more secure there than it is on LJ, you are — to be polite about it — living in a fucking DreamWorld.

That's it. Here, have a video from one of the best song-writers and musicians of our age.

And yet ...

Well, I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't make DW your primary blog host if you're more comfortable with it. They certainly seem like good people, and it's not owned by a faceless corporation, Russian or otherwise. (If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be paying for a premium membership there as well as here.)

Yes, indeed it is

Dreamwidth.org. It's a fork of the LiveJournal code, so basically the same in terms of functionality (though it hasn't implemented much in the way of photo-hosting and they won't, for security reasons, apparently, allow Tweets to automatically pollute populate one's journal. It does, on the other hand, pretty flawlessly cross-post from DW to LJ.

The folks running it seem to be big into things like free speech, so I like 'em for that, and they're good about communicating on tech issues, too.

Whether or not you want to run away from the Russians, I certainly recommend it as a secondary and/or primary platform and as a back-up.

Re: Yes, indeed it is

So far as I remember, they don't "do" photos. You can definitely embed images from elsewhere. Most of mine are hosted on my own site, with a few coming from my Twitter or Facebook accounts. (I gave up on using LJ's frankly cumbersome system years ago.)

I have had a friend who just switched complain that his videos were broken when imported into DW. I don't remember that being a problem with mine, but maybe I should have a look ...